Possible working session/workshop: If anyone is interested, we could take part in a Wikipedia edit-a-thon like at THATCamp Feminisms West and South: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Feminists_Engage_Wikipedia

SESSION NOTES

I could help facilitate a session on crowdfunding for projects in the humanities–this month I’ve been running a Kickstarter campaign for my oral history project on African American AIDS activism. The link is here:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/346908961/african-american-aids-activism-oral-history-projec

I would like to be able to do a session from my own experience about how to do this successfully, so if y’all could share with friends and pledge something if you can, that would be really helpful. In any case, I’d be happy to share and to talk about things like promoting through social media, making an introductory video, and any of the technical aspects of setting up a Kickstarter campaign. If anyone has used other platforms like Indiegogo maybe we could pair up and lead a session together.

PS There’s also a video update that might be of particular interest to y’all, since it’s a clip from an interview with one of the founding members of the U.S. Women’s Positive Network:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/346908961/african-american-aids-activism-oral-history-projec/posts/403194

SESSION NOTES

Lately I’ve become interested in the idea of building a platform for crowdsourcing information about activist affiliations that could be used to generate an open access database that would a) be available for research and b) also power web-based visualizations. So more concretely, I work on AIDS activism, and I know that a lot of people I’ve encountered in the archive participated in different organizations in different capacities. I want to model these relationships, but I would also like to have others contribute to the database, so that it’s not just based on what’s available in archives. As a group, maybe we could think about some of the technical database and visualization issues, as well as concerns about privacy and legality, or more theoretical concerns that I haven’t thought of.

SESSION NOTES